Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [79]
But these were the exceptions, the times when he broke out of his role as a visitor—a stranger—and ate the best of local produce. More typical were the first-class hotels that seemed “to use poor cheap 2d hand meats and veg[etables] because [they were] cheap,” that bought “strawberries when they [had] been 2 full months in market,” and then only the oldest and worst. He was sarcastically grateful for new potatoes, offered once and once only; Europe was not his home. “Short visits to Europe are better for us than long ones,” he reflected. “The former preserve us from becoming Europeanized; they keep our pride of country intact, and at the same time they intensify our affection for our country and our people.”
He scorned blind, political patriotism; but he did feel affection—love—for his home. Now he wanted the genuine, the honest, the real. “Ah for a hot biscuit,” he longed in his journal, and “coffee, real coffee, with real cream.—& real potatoes. Fried chicken, corn bread, real butter, real beefsteak, good roast beef with taste to it.” The menu began as a tribute to all his favorite foods, wherever in the world he’d eaten them; the first draft, in his journal, included chickens and hard-boiled eggs from Palestine, raisins and figs from Smyrna, Egyptian dates and pomegranates, South Island flying fish, and turtle steak (probably eaten in Hawaii, then called the Sandwich Islands), as well as complimentary nods to Roquefort cheese, German trout, English turtle soup, whitebait sole, and mutton. But as he went on—as he went deeper—the memory of American foods drew him back, and back, and back.
Maybe the Boston humiliation helped Twain to see American food in a different way; maybe his menu was, in some small, unconscious way, an act of defiance. It was at least the product of a defiant mood. Had the elite rejected his plain humor and language? Here, then, was his celebration of simple, honest, genuine American flavors. Here were things he loved without reservation or apology. He knew the country that produced them; it was, he thought, plainspoken, vibrant, straightforward, generous, and young . . . and perhaps too brash for the sophisticates who had wounded him to appreciate.
The Whittier dinner had gloried in consommé printanier royal, capon à l’anglaise, smelts panne, squabs en compote à la francaise. . . .
Game on.
“Radishes,” he wrote. “Baked apples, with cream. Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. . . .”
CALF’S HEAD À LA TERRAPIN
Wash and clean a calf’s head, and cook until tender in boiling water to cover. Cool and cut meat from cheek in small cubes. To two cups meat dice add one cup sauce made of two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour, and one cup White Stock, seasoned with one-half teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper, and few grains cayenne. Add one-half cup cream and yolks of two eggs slightly beaten; cook two minutes and add two tablespoons Madeira wine.
—FANNIE MERRITT FARMER, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896
It’s been over two hundred years since John Adams ate terrapin during the Continental Congresses. It’s been ninety-one since sherry, the essential ingredient, temporarily disappeared during Prohibition (a lull that probably saved the terrapin from extinction). And it’s been more than eighty since terrapin soup, by then rare enough to be eaten only by the wealthy, formed the first course of the first Academy Awards dinner. Now Marguerite Whilden roots three gentle fingers into a backyard patch of sand in Neavitt, Maryland, searching for a clutch of diamondback eggs.
The ideal terrapin habitat combines soft sand for nesting, thick marsh grasses where hatchlings can hide, and estuaries filled with oysters, snails, and clams. Even more than prairie chickens